


Bar Scene: Regret

by Melthalion (kemelios)



Series: Bar Scenes [1]
Category: Sports Night
Genre: Angst, Depressing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-01
Updated: 2011-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-16 01:00:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kemelios/pseuds/Melthalion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>"Bar Scenes" is a series of unrelated stories written long ago with three things in common: they're set approximately 10 years in the future, they feature a bar, they're about one or more SN characters.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Bar Scene: Regret

**Author's Note:**

> "Bar Scenes" is a series of unrelated stories written long ago with three things in common: they're set approximately 10 years in the future, they feature a bar, they're about one or more SN characters.

The last time I saw Casey McCall he was shaking his head at some notes for our next show, walking toward the door of our office. He had that little crease between his eyes that he gets whenever he's confounded by an inanimate object. His hair was just on the good side of shaggy, his tie loose around his long pale neck. I knew that whoever straightened him up in wardrobe would get a noseful of English Leather. Charlie bought him a huge bottle for Father's Day and he's been smelling like my grandfather ever since. I watched him until he disappeared behind a curve in the hallway before picking up my briefcase. Scribbling "Isaac" on the front of the envelope I'd purposefully left sitting on my desk all day, I dropped my keys into it, grabbed my jacket and headed down the hall to the elevator.

"Dan!" I heard Dana's heels pounding the carpet as she rushed to catch up to me. I paused and turned with a smile so that she'd know there were no hard feelings, later.

"How may I help you, Dana?"

"Where are you going? Where's your script? It's three o'clock."

"To get a bagel. On my desk. Three-oh-six."

"Okay," said in a slow drawl, one eyebrow cocked in disbelief as she eyed my briefcase. Dana's sudden shifts from mania to quietude have always unnerved me.

"Back by four," she warned me with a little grin, waving frenetically at Jeremy who was exiting the edit room. What the hell. I threw a friendly little wave Jeremy's way as well as I stepped onto the waiting elevator and turned around to take one last glimpse of the studio that had housed my life. I said so long with my eyes as the elevator door slid shut.

My intention - which seemed so clear to me at the time, but which now I have to smile remembering - to leave the nest, leave the shadowy hollow of Casey's wing, jump into the world and see if Dan Rydell could fly on his own. Be my own man. Maybe get my own show. Head anchor, Dan Rydell. I even had an interview lined up with ESPN3 out of L.A. for later that same week.

The truth is I couldn't handle being second-best. We'd grown into a family of sorts at Sports Night: Isaac, the stern but affectionate father figure, Dana, manic mom in need of a few 'little helpers,' Natalie, the spunky youngest child, Jeremy, the family pet. I played the sullen and cynical kid in the middle, of course. And Casey? He was the son the folks bragged about at church. He was the one praised by the bumper sticker on the back of the Volvo. Our son is an honor student. Our son made the track team. Our son is the 92nd most influential person in sports.

My bitterness drove a wedge between us. It grew in my belly until just looking into those warm brown eyes or seeing the vulnerable nape of his neck as he bent his head filled my heart with rage. The world believed a lie about us. They thought that I held him back when he gave up being Conan O'Brien's sidekick to anchor sports news with me. Words like devotion were passed around. But the reality is that Casey could never be a sidekick. It's not in his personality. It's in mine. He's held me back.

It's difficult to peak before you're thirty - to look back ten years later and know that you never had it better than when you were the spoiled and beloved middle child and sidekick. I didn't fly from the nest; I left my perfect niche. I left my better half. Needless to say, ESPN3 didn't work out. After Sports Night I lost my taste for television. I lost my calling. I missed Casey.

I suppose the clinical term is depression. I fit right in behind the bar, serving life's outcasts and the mentally unhealthy. Losers. The best thing, though, or sometimes the worst depending upon the kind of night I'm having, hangs about four feet above my head on a black metal track. Every night around six-fifteen, Casey smiles and gives me the scores and latest scoop on the local evening news. I always smile back with a little wave and a "Hey, Case" at the television. And if I get a bit teary-eyed on draft day and the night after the World Series, well, I blame it on cigarette smoke. My patrons never call me on it. No one wants to hear the bartender's life story, after all.


End file.
